French Fridays: How to make profiteroles (video)

I don’t think it’s any secret how much I love working with choux pastry… I’ve written about it extensively here on this site… and it’s one of my favourite classes to teach too!

I’ve made choux pastry with my cooking club before as well – profiteroles for Christmas, chouquettes and gougères, just to name a few examples. Kids LOVE making choux – it’s the magical pastry that goes through various stages of looking like mashed potatoes, curdled eggs, an elastic, sticky dough and then, in the oven, transforms to become lovely airy puffs of deliciousness ready to be filled and decorated. It has both sweet and savoury applications too, which I love!

Since I know how much kids love making this, I was thrilled when, this term in Grade 4, a group of boys chose to research the history of profiteroles and, as a way of showing what they had learned, bake up a batch (actually three batches, so nearly 100!) and share with their classmates. As the “presentation” piece, the boys wanted to make a recipe video which, of course, I was very excited to help them with! Before you go thinking this was a simple, let’s answer a few questions, write up the answers and bake a batch of profiteroles whilst shooting a video-type project, I’ll have you know we started this project back in November 2016… We’ve worked a little bit each lesson on this project alongside other activities (preparing puppet and play presentations!) and the “research” piece has been challenging (with Grade 4 French, it’s hard to find “real-world” websites that they can understand – but we did!) but the boys’ excitement at sharing their work with their parents this week has made it all worthwhile!

So, without further ado, here’s how you make profiteroles according to Grade 4 (this is my version of the footage, the boys in the group each have their own (very) unique versions!):

Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks as I share how to make crêpes and crème caramel (didn’t they choose delicious “research” topics?)

It’s actually much easier to mix by hand at first – that way you know what the dough is supposed to feel like when it’s ready. Using a mixer it’s easy to overmix…. Thanks so much – it’s not very polished but I hope it shows that kids can do anything!

Such a cute video and those kids are really talented! I love working with choux pastry as well, and a profiterole cake has always been my birthday cake of choice in Italy (including last September). Thank you for showing that choux pastry is not as intimidating as it might seem, even kids can make it when following a good teacher.

That video was fantastic!! The kids did a great job. I had forgotten how easy it was to make pastries like that. I know my family would love to eat some of those profiteroles. Looking forward to your other class projects.